Your Teenager Is Not Your Enemy

Understanding What Allah Built Into the Teenage Years and What He Is Asking of You

By Imam Ayman Al-Taher, RP

There is a parent I speak with regularly in my clinical practice whose description of their teenager I have heard, in almost identical words, across thirty years of working with Muslim families.

At home: impossible. Everywhere else: perfect.

The teacher loves them. The coach trusts them with genuine responsibility. The neighbor stops me in the parking lot to tell me what a wonderful young person they are. And at home, in the family that loves them most and has invested in them most, they are arguing, withdrawing, pushing back against everything, and making the people who care most about them feel like they are failing.

What is happening?

Three things. Simultaneously. By divine design.

What Is Actually Happening: The Biology

Let me tell you what is happening in your teenager’s brain right now, because understanding this will change how you respond to what you are seeing.

Allah designed the human brain to develop in a specific sequence. The emotional center of the brain, what the neuroscientists call the limbic system, reaches its full development and its peak sensitivity during the teenage years. This is the system responsible for feelings, for threat detection, for the intensity of emotional experience. During the stage that the Islamic tradition calls futuwwah, this system is running at maximum power.

At the same time, the part of the brain responsible for regulation, for weighing consequences, for pausing before acting and taking the long view, the prefrontal cortex, is still under active construction. It will not reach full maturity until the mid-twenties.

So Allah designed the teenage years as the specific developmental period when the emotional accelerator is running at full intensity and the regulatory brakes are still being built.

This is not a mistake. This is not a malfunction. This is the specific neurological design of futuwwah: the stage of boldness, energy, intensity, and the capacity for conviction that changes the world. The young companions of Dar al-Arqam who believed first, under Qurayshi persecution, in the house of a sixteen-year-old boy, were carrying exactly this neurological configuration. Their conviction was not moderated by the adult nervous system’s tendency toward caution and calculation. It was burning at the full intensity of the stage Allah designed for precisely this kind of commitment.

But for the parent watching from inside the family, this neurological reality means that your teenager is not experiencing life the way you are experiencing it. When something feels overwhelming to them, it is genuinely overwhelming at a neurological level that the adult nervous system does not maintain. When something feels urgent, it is neurologically urgent in a way that your nervous system has largely outgrown. When they say they cannot calm down, they are sometimes telling you something neurologically true: the calming systems are not yet fully built.

The stress hormone cortisol runs at a higher baseline during adolescence than at any other point in the human lifespan. The Muslim teenager who is navigating Islamic identity, cultural expectations from their family’s heritage, school performance, peer belonging, social media, and the ordinary demands of family life is doing all of this in a nervous system that is already running hotter than the adult nervous system under no stress at all.

When the Prophet ﷺ noticed that the young men who had come to Medina to learn were missing their families after twenty nights, he did not push through their homesickness. He recognized the limit. He said: go back to your families, stay with them, teach them what you have learned. He sent them home with a mission rather than keeping them beyond what their nervous systems could sustain.

This is the most practically important biological principle available to every parent of a teenager: know your teenager’s nervous system limit. Not their character limit. Not their faith limit. Their nervous system limit. The formation that happens when the nervous system is genuinely available is the formation that lands. The formation pushed through an exhausted or overwhelmed nervous system produces the specific resistance and the specific association of Islamic content with the feeling of being pushed past one’s limit, which is the opposite of what every parent intends.

There is also a specific neurological dimension to the peer influence that every parent of a teenager observes and worries about. The social brain, the specific network of neural regions that processes social information, runs at peak sensitivity during futuwwah. Peer belonging does not simply feel important to your teenager. It feels neurologically urgent in the same way that physical safety feels urgent. The teenager who is excluded from their peer group is experiencing something that registers in the same brain regions as physical pain.

This is why the Prophet ﷺ said: al-mar’u ala din khalilihi, a person follows the religion of their friend. This is not only a moral warning. It is a neurological description of what actually happens in the teenage brain when the social brain is running at peak sensitivity and the peer community’s Islamic orientation is the primary social mirror available. The peer community that reflects Islamic identity as normal, genuine, and the basis of real belonging is not simply a nice thing to have for the Muslim teenager. It is a neurological necessity during the specific window when peer social information is being processed with maximum intensity.

What Is Actually Happening: The Psychology

The biological reality sets the stage. The psychological task of futuwwah is what makes the stage genuinely demanding for every parent watching it from the outside.

Allah designed the teenage years as the specific developmental period in which the human being moves from the inherited identity of childhood toward the genuinely chosen identity of adult life.

Your child grew up accepting what you told them. They prayed because you told them to pray. They fasted because the family fasted. They identified as Muslim because the household was Muslim. This is healthy. This is how formation begins. It is not where formation ends.

The teenager’s developmental task is to take what was given and examine it. To ask: do I actually believe this? Is this genuinely mine or is it only mine because it was my parents’? What do I actually think about any of this?

This examination process, what the developmental psychologist James Marcia called identity moratorium, looks from the outside exactly like what you are probably seeing in your teenager: the questioning, the pushing back, the disengagement from practices that seemed settled, the conversations that feel like challenges rather than conversations.

I need to say what follows clearly, because every parent reading this needs to hear it: the teenager who is genuinely wrestling with their Islamic identity is not departing from Islam. They are doing the developmental work that produces the genuine Islamic conviction that holds across adult life. The teenager who never wrestles never genuinely chooses. And the faith that was never genuinely chosen cannot hold under the specific pressures that genuine adult life produces.

The Quran describes three categories of believers in Surah Fatir:

ثُمَّ أَوْرَثْنَا الْكِتَابَ الَّذِينَ اصْطَفَيْنَا مِنْ عِبَادِنَا فَمِنْهُمْ ظَالِمٌ لِّنَفْسِهِ وَمِنْهُم مُّقْتَصِدٌ وَمِنْهُمْ سَابِقٌ بِالْخَيْرَاتِ بِإِذْنِ اللَّهِ

"Then We caused to inherit the Book those We have chosen of Our servants. And among them is he who wrongs himself, and among them is he who is moderate, and among them is he who is foremost in good deeds by permission of Allah."

(Quran 35:32)

The muqtasid, the moderate, maintains the expected practice without the depth of genuine conviction. This is performed Islam: the teenager who prays when watched and does not pray when not watched, who fasts Ramadan because the household requires it and barely thinks about it otherwise, who identifies as Muslim in the mosque community and manages a different identity everywhere else. Their Islamic identity held during the teenage years because the social environment supported it. It will not necessarily hold when the social environment changes.

The sabiq bil-khayraat, the foremost in good deeds, has genuinely internalized the faith and moves toward it with the specific initiative and forward momentum of someone who has arrived at what they will give everything for. This is chosen Islam: the young person whose Islamic identity holds because it was genuinely examined, genuinely questioned, and genuinely selected.

Every Muslim parent wants the sabiq bil-khayraat for their teenager. And the developmental reality is that the only path from the muqtasid to the sabiq bil-khayraat goes through the moratorium process that looks, from the outside, exactly like your teenager is questioning everything you raised them to believe.

They are. And that is exactly what genuine Islamic formation requires.

The psychological separation process, what the developmental psychologists call separation-individuation, is the specific developmental mechanism through which this genuine choosing becomes possible. The teenager who pushes against the parental identity, who insists on being seen as a distinct person rather than an extension of their parents, who needs the space to construct a self that is genuinely their own, is doing the developmental work that makes genuine choosing possible.

Ibrahim alayhis salam modeled healthy separation from his father Azar with the most tender language available: ya abati, O my dear father, four times. He offered knowledge. He promised prayer. And when the separation became necessary, he departed with peace rather than anger, with clarity rather than contempt.

Salamun alayk. Peace be upon you. He separated. He did not hate.

The destination of that separation, when the parent holds the relationship through it rather than closing down against it, is something the Quran shows us at the end of Ibrahim alayhis salam’s story. Ibrahim had left his infant son Ismail in a barren desert valley years before. They were separated for years. Ismail grew up without his father beside him daily. And when Ibrahim alayhis salam returned and Allah commanded him to sacrifice this son he had waited decades for, Ismail’s response was not the compliance of a child under parental authority. It was the freely chosen submission of a young man who had formed his own genuine relationship with Allah:

يَا أَبَتِ افْعَلْ مَا تُؤْمَرُ سَتَجِدُنِي إِن شَاءَ اللَّهُ مِنَ الصَّابِرِينَ

"O my father, do what you have been commanded. You will find me, if Allah wills, among the patient."

(Quran 37:102)

And then the Quran shows us what all of that produced: Ibrahim and Ismail, father and son, working side by side, raising the foundations of the Kaaba together, both praying the same du’a at the same moment:

رَبَّنَا تَقَبَّلْ مِنَّا

"Our Lord, accept this from us."

(Quran 2:127)

The son who was separated from his father became the young man who chose to stand beside him. Not because he was required to. Because he arrived there genuinely. That is the destination of the separation-individuation process. Not the separation itself. What the separation, held with patience and warmth, was always building toward.

The triple identity negotiation.

The contemporary Muslim teenager in the West is navigating something that no previous generation of Muslim teenagers faced in quite the same form: the simultaneous negotiation of three identity frameworks.

Their Islamic identity, which their family and mosque community transmitted. Their ethnic and cultural heritage, which their parents brought from another country and which marks them as different in the context they were born into. And the identity offered by the surrounding secular world, available with the full neurological appeal of the social brain running at peak sensitivity.

Three frameworks. One teenager. Simultaneously.

When your teenager says: I do not know who I am, they are not being dramatic. They are describing something that is genuinely difficult. The parent who responds to this with the demand that the teenager simply be Muslim, without engaging the genuine complexity of what being Muslim in this specific context at this specific developmental stage actually requires, is addressing one framework of a three-framework challenge and wondering why the response does not land.

The need for genuine knowing.

Across thirty years of clinical practice working with Muslim teenagers and their families, the single most consistent finding I can offer is this:

The teenager who feels genuinely known by their parent is the teenager who is most likely to remain genuinely open to what the parent represents.

Not evaluated. Not monitored. Not corrected. Known.

Tariq was seventeen when his father brought him to see me. His father had done everything right by most measures: Quran classes from age seven, Islamic school, halal household, Friday prayers that were non-negotiable. And Tariq said: my father knows everything about Islam and nothing about me. He can tell you what I am supposed to believe. He cannot tell you what I actually think about anything, because he has never asked.

The Islam that is transmitted through authority without genuine relationship is received as controlling rather than caring. And the teenager whose primary experience of Islam is controlling rather than caring is the teenager who is most vulnerable to departing from it the moment the controlling environment is no longer present.

The Islam that is transmitted through genuine relationship, through the specific knowing of the specific person, through the ya Mu’adh inni uhibbuka that precedes the teaching, is the Islam that is most likely to be received as the gift it actually is.

What the Prophet ﷺ Did With Teenagers

The Prophet ﷺ never told a teenager to calm down. He gave them missions.

He declared his love before offering any teaching.

The hadith of Mu’adh ibn Jabal is preserved in two complementary narrations in Sunan Abi Dawud, both graded sahih. In the first narration, the Prophet ﷺ took Mu’adh by the hand and said:

"O Mu’adh, by Allah I love you. By Allah I love you."

Then: I advise you, O Mu’adh, do not leave after every prayer without saying: O Allah, help me to remember You, to thank You, and to worship You in the best manner.

In the second narration, the Prophet ﷺ said: O Mu’adh. Mu’adh responded: labbayk, here I am. The Prophet ﷺ said: I love you.

Begin with what Mu’adh said when the Prophet ﷺ called him.

Labbayk. Here I am. The word that the pilgrim says to Allah at the threshold of Hajj. The word of complete availability, complete orientation, complete readiness. When the Prophet ﷺ called Mu’adh by name, Mu’adh’s response was not simply yes or I am listening. It was the word of the servant who has arrived before the one they are most oriented toward, ready to receive whatever comes next.

Now look at how the Prophet ﷺ responded to that orientation.

Wallahi inni la-uhibbuka. Wallahi inni la-uhibbuka.

In Arabic rhetorical tradition, these words carry three distinct layers of emphasis.

The first is the oath: wallahi, by Allah. The Prophet ﷺ made his declaration of love a sworn statement before Allah. This is not casual affection. This is a covenantal declaration, witnessed by Allah, placed before the teaching that follows.

The second is the emphatic pronoun: inni, which adds the full personal weight of the speaker to the declaration. Not simply I love you but: I, specifically, personally, am the one who loves you.

The third is the repetition: the entire declaration said twice before a single word of teaching was offered. The Prophet ﷺ established the love beyond any possible doubt before the instruction began.

What this sequence establishes is not a warm social nicety preceding the real content. It is the most emphatic available declaration that what Mu’adh was about to receive was being offered from within a genuine bond of love rather than from the formal authority of the teacher over the student.

Only then, after the oath and the emphasis and the repetition, did the teaching come.

Ya Mu’adh, wallahi inni uhibbuka. O Mu’adh, by Allah I love you. Then the teaching. That is the sequence. And the parent who follows it is not being soft or lowering the standard. They are doing exactly what the Prophet ﷺ did with the companion who became the most knowledgeable of the community regarding what is permitted and what is forbidden.

He named their specific gift.

When Abu Mahdhura, a sixteen-year-old in Mecca who had not yet accepted Islam, was caught mocking the adhan with his friends, the Prophet ﷺ heard his voice through the mockery. He called the young man over. The companions expected a rebuke. The Prophet ﷺ said: I heard your voice, and it is very beautiful and strong. He placed his hand on the young man’s chest, prayed for him, gave him silver coins, and appointed him as the Mu’adhin of Mecca. The voice that mocked the adhan became the voice that called Mecca to prayer for the rest of his life. Because the Prophet ﷺ heard the gift behind the behavior rather than only the behavior itself.

He trusted them with genuine responsibility.

When Usamah ibn Zayd was appointed to command an army that included Abu Bakr and Umar at approximately sixteen to eighteen years of age, and the companions objected, the Prophet ﷺ said: if you question his leadership you questioned his father’s before him. Specific trust based on specific knowledge of a specific young person.

He received their questions without alarm.

When a young man came to the Prophet ﷺ asking permission to commit adultery, the companions were outraged. The Prophet ﷺ brought the young man close and asked: would you want this for your mother? For your daughter? He engaged the young man’s own moral reasoning. The young man left with his conviction transformed. Not because he was shamed. Because he was genuinely engaged.

The Four Domains Where Parents and Teenagers Clash

I want to give you a practical tool that will change how you handle the next argument with your teenager.

Research by Judith Smetana at the University of Rochester documents something that every parent of a teenager recognizes the moment they hear it: most family conflict during the teenage years does not happen because the parent and the teenager have different values. It happens because they are classifying the same situation into different categories.

The parent thinks this is a religious obligation. The teenager thinks this is a personal choice. The parent thinks this is an Islamic boundary. The teenager thinks this is a cultural preference being imposed as if it were a religious boundary. The parent thinks this is about safety and wellbeing. The teenager thinks this is about control.

The same situation. Different categories. And because they are operating from different categories, they talk past each other every single time.

Islam has a framework that maps directly onto what this research discovered. When Muslim parents understand this framework, it does not just reduce conflict. It actually protects their Islamic authority where it genuinely matters.

The first domain: What is genuinely Wajib and Haram

The first category is what is genuinely obligatory and genuinely forbidden. Salah. Fasting Ramadan. Avoiding what Allah explicitly prohibited. The parental authority to hold this standard is divinely mandated. It is not negotiable. It is not cultural. It is not generational.

Hold it clearly. Hold it firmly. And hold it with the quality of tarbiyah rather than coercion, because the Islam that is held under coercion without genuine formation will collapse the moment the coercion is absent.

Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas demonstrated what holding this domain looks like when it is done correctly: his mother went on a hunger strike to force him to leave Islam. He loved her deeply and held the line with complete gentleness: O my mother, if you had a hundred souls and they departed one by one, I would not leave my religion. He honored her in everything. He held the divine obligation above her request in the one domain where divine obligation genuinely supersedes parental authority.

The second domain: What is cultural preference presented as Islamic obligation

This is the domain causing the most damage in Muslim families right now.

In the Islamic framework, this corresponds to urf: custom. The culturally specific practices that vary across communities and generations. And this is the most practically important distinction for Muslim families in the West to make.

A saying widely circulated in the Arabic tradition and attributed to the wisdom of the ancients names this challenge with precision:

لَا تُكْرِهُوا أَوْلَادَكُمْ عَلَى آدَابِكُمْ فَإِنَّهُمْ مَخْلُوقُونَ لِزَمَانٍ غَيْرِ زَمَانِكُمْ

"Do not force your children to behave according to your customs, for they were created for a time other than your time."

The Pakistani family’s customs are not Islam. The Arab family’s customs are not Islam. The Turkish family’s customs are not Islam. Each carries a specific urf in which Islam was expressed. That urf is meaningful and worth honoring. It is not identical to Islam itself.

When a father tells his son that men in our culture do not show emotion and presents this as an Islamic value, he has confused urf with deen. When a mother tells her daughter that a good Muslim girl does not have ambitions outside the home and presents this as Islamic obligation rather than a generational cultural preference, she has confused urf with deen. When a family treats the career expectations, dress style, or social customs of their country of origin as Islamic obligations, they have confused urf with deen.

The teenager who experiences their parent’s cultural preferences as Islamic obligations will eventually discover that the Islamic tradition does not actually require what they were told it requires. And at that moment of discovery, the credibility of everything the parent taught as Islamic obligation is questioned, including the things that genuinely are.

The parent who can make this distinction, who can say clearly: this is what Islam requires and this is what our family’s culture practices, is the parent who is protecting their Islamic authority by not diluting it with cultural claims that cannot hold under examination.

The third domain: What is Mubah and belongs to the teenager

This is the domain most parents do not realize they are overreaching into, and where the overreach is doing the most damage to the relationship.

The personal domain is the vast territory of matters that Islam neither requires nor forbids. Hobbies. Personal style within Islamic boundaries. Career preferences. Creative expression. The way the teenager spends their free time within halal limits. These are mubah matters. And the teenager’s claim to personal jurisdiction over them is Islamically as well as developmentally legitimate.

The Prophet ﷺ modeled this with extraordinary precision. When a young boy, identified in the tradition as Ibn Abbas, was sitting to the Prophet’s ﷺ right when a drink was brought, and elders were sitting to his left, the Prophet ﷺ turned to the young boy and asked: will you allow me to give the drink to the elders first? The boy said: by Allah, O Messenger of Allah, I will not give up my share of blessing from you to anyone. The Prophet ﷺ did not get angry. He handed the boy the drink immediately.

The teenager’s legitimate right in a mubah matter was honored even when social convention and adult preference pointed the other direction.

When parents micromanage mubah matters, they are not protecting Islamic formation. They are suppressing the developing taklif and personal moral agency that genuine Islamic formation requires. They are producing the performer rather than the genuine believer. And every argument about something genuinely mubah is spending credibility that the parent needs to maintain in the moral domain.

The fourth domain: What is genuine care for their wellbeing

The fourth domain covers matters of genuine safety and wellbeing. Screen time destroying their sleep. Driving habits putting their life at risk. Friendships leading toward genuine harm. These correspond to the Maqasid al-Shariah, the Islamic obligation to preserve life, intellect, and wellbeing. Parental intervention here is legitimate and necessary.

Luqman alayhis salam’s advice to his son is the complete model for this domain. Every piece of guidance he offered was front-loaded with ya bunayya: O my dear son. The diminutive of affection. Communicating that the boundary is a protective shelter rather than a controlling cage.

When prudential limits are delivered through genuine warmth, the teenager’s receptivity is significantly higher. When they are delivered through anger and control, they are experienced as the personal domain being violated, which produces the defensive resistance that makes genuine communication impossible.

The most important principle from all four domains:

You must deliberately release your authority in the conventional and personal domains in order to protect your authority in the moral and prudential domains.

The parent who claims the same level of authority over their teenager’s cultural customs and personal preferences as they claim over prayer and fasting and avoiding haram, has made all their authority feel equally excessive. Which means the legitimate authority over what genuinely matters loses its credibility alongside the excessive authority over what does not.

The parent who genuinely releases the conventional and personal domains, who can say honestly: the way you dress within Islamic limits is yours, the career you choose within halal is yours, the cultural customs of my generation are mine and not yours, is the parent who maintains the credibility that makes their authority in the moral domain genuinely effective rather than merely resisted.

This is not weakness. This is wisdom. It is the wisdom of distinguishing wajib from urf from mubah from maqasid, and holding each with the quality of authority and flexibility that its domain actually warrants.

What Allah Asks of Us

After everything this article has established about the means available to Muslim parents, the most important thing it must also say is this:

Take the asbab. Leave the outcome with Allah.

The Quran preserved the account of Al-Khidr and the wall he rebuilt: the two orphan children whose inheritance was protected not because of anything they had done but because wa kana abuhuma saliha, their father was a righteous man (Quran 18:82). Your taqwa sends protection forward into your children’s lives in ways you will not always see.

And the Quran also said to the Prophet ﷺ himself: laysa alayka hudahum wa lakinnallaha yahdi man yasha’, it is not upon you to guide them, but Allah guides whom He wills (Quran 2:272). If guidance was not in the Prophet’s ﷺ hands, it is not in ours.

We are tested by our children. Innama amwalukum wa awladukum fitnah, your wealth and your children are a trial (Quran 64:15). The child who flourishes tests our gratitude: will we acknowledge the gift as coming from Allah or attribute it to our own parenting? The child who struggles tests our patience: will we hold our orientation toward Allah or collapse into despair?

We have all seen the families that confound our frameworks. The parent who could barely read whose children became scholars of Islam. The highly educated parent whose child walked away from everything the family represented. The family with five children, three of whom are deeply practicing and two of whom have departed entirely, raised in the same household by the same parents with the same methods and the same love.

These families are not anomalies. They are not evidence that the framework is wrong. They are the living documentation that the parent’s means are real and consequential, and they operate within the plan of Allah, who knows what every soul carries, who gave every human being the freedom to choose, and who governs outcomes that no framework of parenting, however complete, can fully determine.

Ibrahim alayhis salam stood at the Kaaba with his son and prayed:

رَبَّنَا وَاجْعَلْنَا مُسْلِمَيْنِ لَكَ وَمِن ذُرِّيَّتِنَا أُمَّةً مُّسْلِمَةً لَّكَ

"Our Lord, make us both submit to You, and from our descendants a nation that submits to You."

(Quran 2:128)

He asked for his own submission first. Then his descendants. The parent’s own genuine orientation toward Allah is the foundation on which everything asked for the children is built.

He did not live to see the Prophet ﷺ, who was the answer to that du’a. He did not need to. The du’a was genuine. The righteousness was real. And Allah answered in His own time.

Make the du’a. Live the righteousness. Leave the timeline with Allah.

Three Things to Do Today

Not next month. Not when things get better. Today.

One: Ask a genuine question.

Not a test question. Not a checking-compliance question. A genuine question about your teenager’s actual inner life. What is genuinely hard for you right now? What are you actually thinking about? What do you wish I understood about what this stage of your life feels like from the inside?

Then listen. Without correcting. Without redirecting. Without managing where the conversation goes. Just listen.

Two: Name something specific you see in them.

The Prophet ﷺ told Mu’adh he loved him before teaching him anything. He saw Abu Mahdhura’s voice before he addressed the mockery. Name one specific gift you see in your specific teenager. Not a general compliment. The specific thing that only you, who genuinely know them, would see.

I see how much you care about your friends. I see how hard you think about things that matter. I see something in you that not everyone around you has recognized yet.

Say it out loud. To them. Today.

Three: Make the du’a of Ibrahim.

Every day. Rabbana wa ij’alna muslimayni laka wa min dhurriyyatina ummatan muslimatan lak. Our Lord, make us both submit to You, and from our descendants a nation that submits to You.

Make the du’a. Leave the timeline with Allah.

Closing

The Prophet ﷺ said:

"He is not from us who does not show mercy to our young ones and does not show respect to our elders."

Both obligations. Named together. In the same sentence. Neither optional.

The teenager who looks like they would rather be anywhere else than the family dinner table right now, the one whose questions make the adults around them uncomfortable, the one whose intensity feels like a problem rather than a gift: they are carrying what Al-Arqam carried when he opened his door at sixteen, what Usamah carried when he accepted command of an army, what Mus’ab carried when he arrived in Yathrib to transform a city.

The question is not what is wrong with your teenager. The question is whether you can hear what the Prophet ﷺ heard when Abu Mahdhura was mocking the adhan.

He heard a voice.

Ya Mu’adh, wallahi inni uhibbuka.

O my child. By Allah, I love you. Now let me teach you something.

That is the sequence. And it is available to every Muslim parent, beginning with the next conversation they have with their teenager today.

Imam Ayman Al-Taher, RP, is the founder of Al-Iman Family Services in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. He served as a Spiritual Care Provider at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) for 27 years and is the author of the Ihsan Series for Muslim families. He can be reached at [email protected] or through aifs.ca.